We thank my Ionarts colleague Jens F. Laurson, who has stepped in to contribute this week’s installment of DCist Goes to the Symphony, a review of a concert I had to miss because of a last-minute conflict.

The National Symphony Orchestra’s season finale attempts to pull out all the stops it didn’t quite manage so far, and this week’s run of all-Beethoven concerts under the baton of Kurt Masur is an auspicious run-up to the gargantuan, grandiose über-symphony, the Mahler Eighth, next week. The East German Kurt Masur is one of the most esteemed conductors in the business, a no-nonsense European orchestra leader of the old guard. He spent years heading the famous Gewandhausorchester Leipzig (where he was a successor of Felix Mendelssohn, the very prototype of the repertoire conductor) and played a prominent role during the 1989 Monday Protests in Leipzig that were the beginning of the end of the East German dictatorship. After reunification he went on to helm the New York Philharmonic for eleven years and currently presides over the London Philharmonic and the Orchestre National de France.

Masur’s Beethoven credentials are impeccable (violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter won’t play the Beethoven concerto if he can’t conduct it for her), and his treatment of the ‘grand master’ commands respect, even if it does not necessarily elicit excitement. Masur is what is often called a Kapellmeister – a term used for mostly central European conductors that combines admiration for their skill with patronizing, negative connotations about their middle-of-the-road interpretations.